My Post-Divorce Relationship With Holiday Cards
It’s complicated
One morning in early November, I opened my inbox to find a tempting offer.
The shelter where we had adopted our guinea pigs was advertising holiday card portrait sessions. Your furry friend could be photographed either in front of a cozy fire trimmed with Christmas stockings, or atop a toy train chugging through a snowy landscape. “Props will vary depending upon the size of your pet(s),” the message noted, leaving it to the reader to imagine what props might be involved.
The session cost $25 per pet, but bonded pairs counted as one pet. I called my two boys over to ask whether they thought we should get a portrait of our bonded pair of “guinea girls,” Squeak and Munchette. Not surprisingly, they were in favor.
Sending a holiday card featuring our guinea pigs seemed like a light-hearted way to re-enter the world of families who sent holiday cards, a world I had left after getting divorced three years ago. I almost went for it. Maybe it would be a way for us to thumb our noses at convention and let the world know we were okay with being a different kind of family. In the end, though, I decided guinea pigs on a train didn’t say “divorced but fine” so much as “weird, just very weird.”
